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Numbers of Australian smokers in steep decline

NOT all Australia’s endangered species are innocent and furry. The latest to join the at-risk list is self-harming, often smelly, sometimes antisocial – and well on the way to extinction by 2030.

Mike Daube of Curtin University of Technology in Western Australia and his team analysed data on cigarette smoking from the start of the Australian government’s big anti-smoking push, in 1983, until 2004. They found that last year only 17.4 per cent of Australians smoked every day, the lowest rate for any country in the OECD – the club of the 30 leading market-economy democracies. And that was down from …